The Book of Human

 Here's one of the things that bothers me about the coverage of the Atlanta Shooting: it's being portrayed as a direct result of racism against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI), but I'm bothered by that interpretation.  I don't have a determined position on this, but I'd like to hear any other perspectives that might clarify the situation.  The shooter targeted massage parlors, as part of his own crusade against sex work.  The fact that six of the eight people killed were Asian American women isn't a statistical fluke.  Massage parlors are frequently fronts for sex work, and the women employed in them are frequently trafficked from Asia to work there.  Given the shooter's stated motivation, it seems he was going after sex workers, rather than AAPI people.  The fact that these women were Asian didn't have anything to do with why they died, as a first order cause.  If the women working there had been African-American, or White, or Latinx...

 I woke up in the middle of the night and, unable to return to sleep, stumbled across this article on Facebook: https://www.politicalorphans.com/the-article-removed-from-forbes-why-white-evangelicalism-is-so-cruel/ (HT to Cameron McCoy for sharing that). This line in particular struck me: "If all you knew about Christianity came from a close reading of the New Testament, you’d expect that Christians would be hostile to wealth, emphatic in protection of justice, sympathetic to the point of personal pain toward the sick, persecuted and the migrant, and almost socialist in their economic practices." One of the major problems I have with the pro-birth movement (I refuse to call them pro-life, because most of them quit caring after birth) is their willingness to use state power to enforce their beliefs, which includes the prosecution of doctors (and eventually women, just you wait) for terminating pregnancies.  Many of the people in this movement also abhor using taxes to supp...